Tel-Tru Manufacturing Co. Inc.’s St. Paul Street operation is like an archaeological trip through American manufacturing.

Computers sit next to production equipment dating to the 1950s. And in Tel-Tru’s vintage brick building constructed in the late 1800s, contractors earlier this month were working on reinstalling a desk-sized, 116-year-old motor that runs one of the company’s two elevators.

“I guess I don’t have to worry about it for another 116 years,” joked company President Andy Germanow as he looked up at the cast iron guts being worked on.

Thermometer maker Tel-Tru got its start in 1916. And in some ways, the company has not changed much as it continues to be primarily a metal-working business: stamping out metal, bonding together thin strips of dissimilar metal that flex when temperatures change, bending those strips into coils with a pointer attached.

The company mainly serves the industrial market, selling to instrumentation distributors and representatives. Its products, such as its industrial dial thermometers, are found in food and dairy product processing plants, in chemical plants and plastics manufacturing sites, as well as in backyard grills and laboratories.

“We’ve got a very flexible factory system and well-trained staff,” said Germanow, who also is president of optics manufacturer G-S Plastic Optics, which operates next door. Both Upper Falls neighborhood companies are part of Germanow-Simon Corp.

“We can put together any combination of dials, stem lengths, temperature ranges, stem diameters ... it’s custom assembly from standard components,” he said. “We’re putting these things together like an erector set.”

At the same time, Tel-Tru is changing rapidly — particularly as it is pushing into the digital thermometer business. “That’s part of our evolution,” Germanow said.

Germanow-Simon in October cut the ribbon on $3.25 million in renovations and upgrades done primarily to G-S Plastic Optics, though it also is planning significant investments in Tel-Tru.

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The Rochester Top 100, which annually recognizes the fastest-growing privately held companies in the nine-county region, is sponsored by the Rochester Business Alliance and KPMG. Germanow recently discussed Tel-Tru and the successes and challenges it’s facing:

On reclaiming business that had moved overseas:

We’ve been impacted by foreign manufacturing in that some of the markets we used to be big in, a lot of our type of product is coming in from Asia. But we’ve had an interesting experience the last three years — we’ve got some big customers who’ve said, ‘We’re tired of the problems with Asian vendors — quality, delivery,’ and they’re buying from us.

We have one customer who uses a substantial number of thermometers and their customers were coming and buying replacement thermometers from us and were then suggesting to the manufacturer ‘Why don’t you buy from Tel-Tru instead of these crappy things from China?’ They didn’t want to pay more, but in the meantime their product is a consumer product that is pretty expensive and the end users were complaining about cheap thermometers.

Our good fortune is to be working with customers who care about the quality of what they’re getting and where price necessarily isn’t the be-all end-all. Not everybody buys the cheapest car. You buy the best value for the money you have available to you. It’s true in the industrial sales world as well.

On Tel-Tru’s growth:

We’ve picked up a couple other OEM accounts that are industrial accounts that have made a big difference for us. Some of that business coming back from Asia and some of these OEM accounts have built things up for us. The base business has come back up closer to where it was pre-recession.

The Top 100, the jump that got us there, we had a record year in 2011. That was from new customers.

On landing those new customers:

Customers have to be confident you’ll be able to take care of them. We see people switching because there’s some kind of pain involved with their other situation — technical pain or commercial pain of some type. If you can find a way to make the pain go away and keep it away, it makes a difference.

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Also, we try to go to our existing customers — is there other business we can get with them? It’s a struggle in terms of industrial distribution because our product is nobody’s bread and butter. Its our bread and butter, but for our sales channel partners, there’s nobody who lives and dies whether or not they’re selling thermometers from us. It’s their salt and pepper. It’s a challenge for us to get — the buzzword is ‘mindshare’ — a percentage of their time. They’ve got some big valve they can sell for thousands of dollars. They’re not thinking about the thermometers.

On the Tel-Tru workforce:

Training is a huge thing. We have an interesting thing we’ve experienced the last two years: We’ve had some very nice growth, brought in a lot of new people and had some old-timers retire, and training has become a big issue. We just developed a strategic plan for the development of the business and the core of the whole thing is what we call ‘employee engagement’ — training people so they become experts of their jobs. The way we wind coils today, the way we do the metal stamping, whatever it is, is very very different from what it was five years ago and worlds away from what it was 30 years ago. Continuous improvement. And a big part of that is training. We’re in the middle right now of developing new training programs for our staff.

On investments in Tel-Tru and G-S:

(The G-S project) was a lot of balancing. (Gesturing) These machines were all down at the other end and at this side of the building was a lot of small offices. We put a big wall up and we had to be careful because we couldn’t get any dust, so we had a positive air machine in here, all kinds of things to keep the dust down and let us keep manufacturing. We didn’t miss any deliveries, we kept everything going. It was a lot of juggling. We also redesigned how we set up the machines. We needed more space for manufacturing. Now we have room to expand. The other thing is, it’s a much cleaner shop than we had before, more efficient. When (customers) came to visit us before, and you just saw the place looking like a wreck, it was like ‘Are these guys going to be here in a week?’ Now, the other part of it is, we don’t want to look like we’re doing too well (laughs).

(For Tel-Tru) We’ve got an additional new CNC machine coming in. We’ve got a special low-temperature tank coming in. We’re investigating some other equipment. So even though it’s an old business and an old mature product line, we’re finding modern ways to do the work we do. We just received a proposal from somebody to improve a critical part of our operation. If we were doing things today the way we were doing them when I started, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking.